Retro Games

Nintendo’s Wii console is not only fun with the slew of current generation games, it also brings back fond memories of old thanks to the inclusion of Virtual Console capability. This has made it possible for us to re-enact our happy childhood memories where 8-bit graphics and a ton of imagination were more than enough to keep us glued in front of the TV for hours on end, until our parents threaten to throw us out of the house just to get some sunshine (serves them right for purchasing a Nintendo/Sega Master System in the first place, eh?). I’m happy to announce that the Virtual Console will be receiving new titles courtesy of Interplay Entertainment Corp., where four franchise titles that hail from the Sega Genesis system will soon be made available.

I’m beginning to look forward to Mondays not because I love my job at the office, but because there might be some gems released for the Wii’s Virtual Console. While releases in the past few weeks hasn’t exactly been stellar to say the least, this week’s offerings will definitely perk you up with No More Heros. In addition to that, I have taken to gazing at my crystal ball, and have seen the gaming goodness available to help us through the current gaming drought. Retro titles FTW! Not only do these downloads let you while away those hours, they also lack the physical packaging that will probably end up as junk a short while later.

Fans of the Nintendo Wii’s Virtual Console will be pleased to know that they will soon benefit from game titles from Hudson Soft. Beginning in October, Wii owners will be able to download games from the Turbo CD and Super CD library, with the initial plan seeing up to five different titles being released before the year is over. In addition, Hudson Soft has plans to release another 10 more games next year. How much will games from the Turbo CD and Super CD era retail? Well, they’ll fall into the pricing tier system of 800 Wii Points, which is the equivalent of $8 in real world money.

If you’re a stickler for retro games, then the Pac-Man Championship Edition ought to whet your appetites. This retro inspired game will be available to all Xbox 360 owners, and is touted to be the honest to goodness sequel of the original Pac-Man that saw action more than two and a half decades ago. Are there actually ways to make that classic game better? Apparently, the answer is in the affirmative as the Joystiq crew check out the game. There are several interesting additions to the classic arcade gameplay that warrant more than a passing mention, and we’ll check those out after the jump.

Own up now – how many of you guys and gals actually spent countless hours in front of the computer, engrossed in the clicking frenzy that is called Minesweeper? I myself have done my fair share of clicking, but I was never good enough to complete all three levels – Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert under the magical 100 second mark. To tell you the truth, I never really came close to that at all, but that is another can of worms for another day. What you see, ladies and gentlemen, is the world record for Minesweeper in Expert mode. Dion Tiu managed to unearth all those mines in a mere 38 seconds – more than double that of a Rubik’s Cube world record, but equally impressive at the very least.

Is it even possible to collect every single Nintendo Entertainment System game that was ever released in the U.S.? Apparently so, if the claims of seller sonyabscott is correct. Sonyabscott is putting on the table a fully functioning NES system in great condition along with 670 officially licensed Nintendo game. The current asking price has already reached a whooping $25,300. Some cyber sleuths did some groundwork and noticed that over the months, sonyabscott has silently picked up an obscure title here and there for a buck or so, making him a brilliant strategist. In hindsight, it could be the bidders who are residing on the lower end of the intelligence scale as paying such an exorbitant amount for instant gaming street cred is just pure insanity.

Following the recent updates of Taito classics such as Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands comes the news that New Zealand Story is the next candidate for update on the DS.

The arcade original was a platform game where you played as Tiki the Kiwi. Your mission was to rescue all your Kiwi pals, who had been captured by Wally Walrus. As well as being able to jump around the platforms, you could also ride around on bizarre little hover pods and hot air balloons, and had a variety of weapons such as a bow and arrow, exploding bombs and even a Laser pistol that could be used to dispatch the many cute and cuddly enemies.

The game was very popular when released, with many home computer versions being produced. The Amiga version was particularly close to the arcade original, and also had a rather memorable cheat mode (MOTHERF**KENKIWIBA**ARDS – fill in the blanks yourself).

We must also acknowledge Bolak for the image on this post, a particularly good rendition of Tiki made using the pixel blocks modelling blocks. Check out his site here for some more excellent gaming related images, including Jet Set Willy and a 1 UP Mushroom.

The Vectrex was a interesting games system distributed by Milton Bradley (better known for their board games) back in 1982. It’s short-lived lifespan ended in 1984 when the videogames market crashed taking many games companies with it. The Vectrex was never a huge seller because of this, but probably never would have been due to it’s unique selling point. The Vectrex was built around a vector graphics display, which no other console before or since has attempted.

So what’s a vector display then? Games consoles normally work using some variant of a bitmapped display, which put simply means that the screen is split into a rectangular grid of pixels. Each pixel can potentially be changed by writing to a particular area of the consoles memory which gets read and converted into a screen display line by line from top to bottom. A vector display on the other hand doesn’t have the concept of a pixel. Instead, the screen is displayed by directly controlling the position of the electron gun to draw lines. If you’ve ever played classic arcade games such as Asteroids or Battlezone, you’ll have seen a vector display in action.Read the rest of this entry »

For many, the Amiga was the choice home computer of the 16-bit era. The Amiga (named after the Spanish word for girlfriend) first appeared in 1985, launched by Commodore in the form of the A1000, a desktop machine with separate keyboard and mouse. It had 256K of RAM, and a further 256K which was used to hold the operating system, which had to be loaded from a 3.5″ floppy disk every time the machine was switched on. Powered by a Motorola 68000 running at a shade over 7MHz, at the time it was one of the most capable computers you could buy, thanks to the custom chipset which supplied the graphics, audio and general control of the system. At a time when PC’s could only display four colours from a limited choice, the Amiga astounded with a palette of 4096 colours, with 32 available on screen.

The secret weapon of the Amiga chipset was the Blitter, which may seem surprising considering that all it really did was move data from one part of memory to another. The reason it was such a big deal was because it could merge together three streams of data, making sprite based games very simple to achieve, and that it was able to do all this without needing the CPU to get involved. Whilst the Blitter was busy copying data around, the CPU could get on with more important tasks.Read the rest of this entry »

A much overlooked classic from the Commodore 64 days is Alter Ego, a game which even in it’s day would not have been played by many due to the fact it was only available on floppy disc. Whilst there was an icon based front end, all of the game play was related through pages of text, a bit like one of the old classic text adventures from Infocom.

The games premise was to simulate a virtual life, which it did by taking the player from birth, through childhood, adolescence, middle age and into their twilight years by presenting the player with various different reactions to different situations, the kind of normal everyday things most people will have experienced.

As an example, you start the game unborn and still inside your mother, with your first choices being to stay in a bit longer, come out peacefully, or come out kicking and screaming. The game progresses through the different stages of life by offering a number of icons which represent different kinds of events in a typical life. How you react to these situations gradually forms the kind of person you will end up being. If you’ve ever wondered what might have happened in your life were you to have done something different at a particular point in your life, then perhaps now you can find out!Read the rest of this entry »